There were several bias failing me for evaluating this card. Some initial ones which I have since shaken off such as it being a gold card and having things that are better at its job already. Basically a long time ago I decided this was a fiddly convoluted gold spell for which better alternatives existed and as such never really revisited it. I have gotten far better at appreciating card quality and evaluating cards over the last five years of doing this blog. The thing is that I need to be thinking about cards and ideally using them to be evaluating them. I haven't with Lim-Dul's Vault and so my old evaluations of the card are the ones I believe. What has happened here is much like a TV program or a song that you liked when you were younger and haven't seen or heard in ages. When you actually do see/hear it again you suddenly realise your tastes have changed and you don't like it any more. With the Vault I thought it was weak and believed that was a valid assessment of the card despite being wildly out of date. There was nothing sudden about the changes in my appreciation for card quality, that was a gradual and steady progression. It is only apparent how significant of a change it is when I come to use a card like this again some years down the line.
Lim-Dul's Vault is to Vampiric Tutor what Lightning Helix is to Lightning Bolt. Good enough as a 3 point burn spell to be cube worthy and with some bonus value bolted on. Lim-Dul's Vault is pretty much Vampiric Tutor with Index bolted on. Now, both Index and Healing Salve are not good cards but that is because it is not worth losing a card for the effects. Throw "draw a card" onto either of those weak one mana spells and you have a really good spell. That is basically why Lightning Helix is good, it is a Healing Salve with "draw a card" on it, it just so happens that you always draw and play a Lightning Bolt.
Sage Owl isn't greatly playable because you don't wan't a Flying Man so the fact that you can get that Index plus draw a card feel is less exciting. You need to actively want one part of the card for the free bonus to kick in and be good. Vampiric Tutor is something a lot of people and archetypes want, much much more so than Flying Man. Due to the tutor being a thing you want the affect is that the Index portion of the card gains that free feeling.
So, how good is Index? More relevantly, how good is it off the back of a Vampiric Tutor? A whole boat load better than a Healing Salve, I can say that for sure. It turns out Index is really juicy it is just not something often found bolted on to a card you actually otherwise want to play. Index with draw a card added on would be one of the best card quality spells in cube. In terms of the options given per card or per mana Index it is one of the largest in all of magic. Five is a lot of cards and should give a decent spread of things, say a big thing, a small thing, some lands and the thing you specifically wanted. Being able to order these as you want adds a surprising amount of value. Index is a thing that actively works with a tutor effect and so both in concert yields an overall better effect.
You can use Vault profitably basically any time you have spare mana. You might ultimately want a six drop for the matchup but using a Vampiric Tutor to do so on turn two seems bad. Vault however can find it, leave it waiting in your deck till you can actually use it and still improve the quality of the turns in between. Alternatively Vault can go find a card you want and hopefully one or two others and then, like Brainstorm, use a shuffle effect to get shot of the unwanted cards.
There are some cool things going on with Vault which warms me to the card as well. If for some reason you have infinite life and your library does not have a number of cards in it that is evenly divisible by five then you can tutor up any five cards from your deck! Not sure why you need five specific cards to win when you already have infinite life but still. Pretty cool. Also, in all the various debates about which are the hardest magic cards to play I can only think that obscurity is what keeps this out of the top slots. In every way imaginable this is the hardest magic card in the whole game. It has far far more choices and options going on. I did a top ten hardest cards list draft a while back and a selection of the top cards included Brainstorm, Gifts Ungiven, Divining Top, Vampiric Tutor and simply put, Lim-Dul's Vault crushes all of those for complexity. It has pretty much all the different difficulties and things going on as all those other cards but rolled into one incredibly cheap card. One could debate long and hard between this and Gifts Ungiven, the commonly viewed most difficult card, as to which is tougher but as of recently I am very much in the Lim-Dul's Vault camp.
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